


perhaps one day i'll grieve

by bruised_fruit



Series: headcanon compliant [16]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, decade era, self injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2020-05-02 03:30:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19191025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bruised_fruit/pseuds/bruised_fruit
Summary: She cuts too deeply sometimes, is a thing you learned a long time ago. But you don’t know it now, and you only barely know that the red seeping through her shirt is bad, very bad.





	perhaps one day i'll grieve

**Author's Note:**

> this is a repost. title from, and somewhat inspired by, bnl's "told you so"
> 
> i never jumped in and rescued you  
> but i wanted to  
> i didn't tell you which way to go  
> 'cause i thought you'd know

She cuts too deeply sometimes, is a thing you learned a long time ago. But you don’t know it now, and you only barely know that the red seeping through her shirt is bad, very bad.

The two of you are standing in the metal kitchen of the ship ( _your_ ship) _._ She had just unlocked your door and was cooking up some eggs, and now she’s looking down at herself (almost absently, future you will remember with unease), a furrow in her brow.

You look at her face, and you don’t know what exactly she’s thinking. She’s making an expression, for sure, but then it all statics out and your head hurts too much to follow the thought. (For the most part, you try not to think.)

“Davenport?” you ask. You aren’t panicking.

“I don’t know,” she says, an edge to her voice as she switches the stove off. She unbuttons her shirt and balls it up against her stomach.

She walks out of the room, and you stand there a moment—did you make her angry? a part of you wonders, confused—before easing yourself down. There are windows showing you the time, you’re pretty sure, and the floor is cool and solid under you. You can wait for her to come back. There isn’t much else to do.

As you think this, your relic spawns a monstrous, hundred-eyed beast. It turns to its creator, plucking her up from the desert sands, and she is gnashed to death between its rows and rows of sharp teeth. It gets its gigantic claws on the Oculus, and the cycle repeats.

But that is truly irrelevant to you, and as far as past you would admit, he’s unbothered too. He cared about her, at least.

A decade from now, you will think with disgust of all the hypertrophic scars you saw, all the times something fresh would open and bleed while you held her during the century, and how you said nothing. You could have made her stop, perhaps. You could have made her feel like she could stop.

Now, the marks like slashes and stab marks on her stomach are inconsequential to your mind. The eggs on the stove are surely cold, and it is dark, so you wander through the empty hallways to look for her. You’re not sure what you’ll find, or if she’ll yell at you again like in the first day with her. (Was that two days ago? Three?)

But it’s either her, or the steel floor. You’re bored, and thinking anything is like poking your brain with a cattle prod. Her! It’s her you want, and you can smell her and hear the little whimpery noises that you already know are the sound of her crying.

You swing open the door. It’s heavy, but quiet. In spite of that, she sees you enter. She doesn’t shoo you away, so you approach her, standing by the foot of the bed. You try to keep your distance, because she’s already made it quite clear that she doesn’t like being touched.

“I was stupid,” she says. It’s an old excuse, you’ll know someday, one that you’ve always responded to wordlessly.

“Davenport...” you offer this time, and she looks to the ceiling as if in prayer. She’s stopped crying, perhaps for your sake, and you have the urge to walk around her bed and touch her face. It looks soft. She looks very soft right now, in general.

There’s a stained towel on her stomach.

Fun fact about you, that always used to haunt you: you never asked her to stop. In fact, you never did anything, you coward, you careless, bullheaded scum. You'd think those things to yourself, but she was at least trying to curb it for the look in your eyes alone.

Now, you lay down on the floor by her bed and stay there. She used to do it multiple times a day, you don’t know, and your presence keeps her safe that night, you don’t know. When you wake up (before her, you have always been an early riser, you don’t know) she is still alive.

That matters to you, quite a bit.

You go to the kitchen and throw out the eggs for her, knowing that seeing the rotten food will distress her. You clean the pan with all the clumsiness of someone who has only learned how to do so from a single observation.

This life is livable, you think, and future you might tear out his hair looking back at your complacency, the sheer scale of your ignorance.

She finds you in the kitchen. The expression on her face and your understanding of it are only partially obscured by the static. She looks terrified, but she relaxes once she sees you. It fills you with a sense of something that you don’t quite understand. Several months later, you begin to think of it as pride.

She mumbles an apology to you. She takes away the pan and cleans it. She makes you toast. She watches you eat it. She begins to cry.

You don’t know what to make of it. You don’t know what to say to her, for her. “Davenport,” you try, all friendly and disarming and supportive. It was the wrong thing, you think, because she gets up from her chair and leaves the room.

(You wish she would stop leaving...)

You clamber down from your chair and head off in search of her, a touch of urgency in your steps.

It doesn’t take very long to find her this time, because she’s in the same room. You can smell her through the door, hear her, and you’re certain it’s her, but this time, the door won’t budge.

She’s crying again, and muttering things that probably aren’t for you. You bang on the door. You put your whole 40 pounds into it. All the banging hurts your hands and arms. (She took knocking from you, and future you will think about that a lot, won’t he?)

You kick the door a few times, now. Your tiny gnome legs are useless against steel, but she’s stopped crying. She’s very quiet in there, like she’s hoping to wait it out and you’ll just disappear. But she opens the door a few moments later to find you slumped down in front of it, knees to your chest.

Past you didn’t talk to her about this much, but growing up, you liked to make yourself small when you were afraid, so as to avoid attracting attention. And you feel just a bit safer being all compact, your stomach protected like this.

Your neck is exposed, though.

She sits down in front of you, right in the threshold of the door to her quarters. She’s wearing a dark, heavy turtleneck. She looks exhausted.

She inspects your hands for injuries, then lets you wrap them around yourself again. She talks to you in a low, slow voice that just makes the static worse (by next year, she will have learned that you are in the least pain when she sounds sharp and bellicose). You cry. You are so weak, and she is everything in that moment (and all moments).

She locks you in your quarters later that morning, saying something you can’t quite parse about a staff. You wait for her. There’s not much else for you to do.


End file.
